There are those moments in our lives that may at first seem uneventful but end up being significant turning points.  Such was the case for Orange sculptor Bret Price as he prepared to attend a faculty meeting at Chapman College in 1979.  An instructor of ceramics and sculpture at the time, he was shutting down the kiln when something occurred that would change the course of his artistic history

“I noticed that a piece of rebar in the kiln used to push in the clay pieces also became soft at high temperatures,” says Price.  “Though I loved working with clay, I had become frustrated with the size limitations in terms of what I could create.  My mantra has always been to create pieces that have never been seen before.  In that uplifting moment, it became clear that I’d shift to steel sculptures.”

Price’s first metal sculpture, a 40-foot-wide twisted piece of steel, took three months to plan and make.  “I bent the steel beam in the school’s faculty parking lot on the weekends when no one was around,” he says.  “A trustee bought that first piece for the school.”

That sculpture started the ball rolling for Price, who soon left academia to create fulltime.  To date, he has made more than 1,000 sculptures, some reaching heights of 34 feet high and weighing 7.5 tons.  His work is found in public and private collections throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia, including a piece in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s permanent collection.

Southern California Roots

Price grew up in Los Angeles in the 1960s.  He attended Pomona College, originally majoring in premed and minoring in painting.  “The premed program was rigorous.  I did okay, but after two years working in admitting at a hospital, I decided the medical field wasn’t for me,” he says.  “I went back to the college and took a ceramics course, soon becoming enmeshed in all things clay.”

Price’s father, Harrison “Buzz” Price, a research economist specializing in how people spend leisure time and resources who consulted with Walt Disney, told his son he didn’t care what he did for a living, as long as he got up in the morning and loved what he was doing.

“I grew up knowing how much my dad enjoyed his work,” says Price, who earned his MFA in 1975 from the California Institute of the Arts.  “I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I did know that I didn’t want to work five days a week just to enjoy the weekend.  Once I found clay, I was all in and started working harder than I had ever worked in my life.  I have enjoyed my career.  I look forward to getting up each morning and going to the studio to make stuff.”

Price, who has lived in the same house in Orange since 1979 with his wife Rae Lynn, had a couple of private studios in Orange from 1987 to 2014.  Then he joined the Logan Creative, a compound for working artists in Santa Ana in 2014.  “It’s a great place for artists to work.  There’s a lot of energy, and everyone knows each other,” says Price, whose son, Gregory Price, a glass artist, has a studio there.  The Prices also have a daughter, Erin Price Lewis.

Transforming Metal in Ohio

In 1999, Price had the opportunity to “bend metal in an Ohio cornfield.”  That eventually resulted in a sprawling sculpture farm in New Bremen, Ohio where he has space to create the large sculptures he is known for.

“It’s a great facility in a beautiful Midwest town that reminds you of a Normal Rockwell painting,” says Price, who spends about 40 percent of his time in Ohio.  He and Rae Lynn made the film, “Art in the Middle,” which chronicles his artistic journey, including the Ohio experience.  In September 2021, he held the exhibition, “Large Scale Sculpture,” at the Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park and Museum in Hamilton, Ohio.

Price’s next exhibition will run from July 21 to September 18 at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton.  The show titled “Under Pressure,” which Price says is a nod to David Bowie, will feature 40 smaller than usual pieces.

The Pyramid Hill show was a 25-year retrospective and weighed 30 tons,” he says.  “In the Mucken- thaler show, I can lift every piece by hand.  The heaviest one weighs 60 pounds, and the tallest piece is 30 inches.”

The sculptures in the Muckenthaler exhibit had their beginnings during the pandemic. “When we were in seclusion, I bought a 40-ton H press that puts 80,000 pounds of pressure on whatever you put underneath it,” says Price.  “I had originally gotten the press to create bases for sculptures, but I soon discovered I could use it to make small pieces.”

The sculptures displayed in the arrangement on the inside front cover of this issue will be in the upcoming exhibit.  “The piece on the bottom left, ‘Turnabout,’ is a ring of steel about 6 feet in diameter,” says Price.  “I just kept bending it and then manipulated it with the press to flatten it.  The top middle piece is called ‘Cosmo.’  The top element in that piece is made from stainless pipe.”

Endless Pursuit

Fiona Lindsay Shen is Director of The Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University’s Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.  She is also one of three authors of the catalogue for Price’s Muckenthaler exhibition.

“I admire Bret’s ability to switch so seamlessly between monumental sculpture and the small, intimate pieces on display in the current exhibition,” says Shen.  “His sculptures are muscular and cerebral at the same time.  For example, his earliest steel piece created on Chapman’s campus, ‘Endless Pursuit,’ accomplishes what good sculpture does: it carves out its own sense of space and presence.  It’s both a large, attention-grabbing artwork and quietly contemplative.  Fittingly for its title, the piece is displayed outside the Chapman Leatherby Libraries.  From a distance, his work is arresting; then when you get close, you become aware of his attention to the sensuous details of the surface.”

Bob and Ann Myers live in Orange and are avid collectors of Price’s work.  They own one of the pieces to be shown in the Muckenthaler exhibit.

“We became familiar with Bret’s work in the late 1980s when we saw a large, twisted steel sculpture at Ruth Bacofners’s Gallery in Santa Monica,” says Bob.  “We acquired our first work of his in 1998 at the Long Beach Museum of Art’s Annual fundraising auction.  He is a unique artist with a brilliant ability to look at ordinary industrial materials and construct them into amazing monumental sculptures, as well as create intimate smaller jewels for your tabletop home display.”

Ann adds, “We truly treasure Bret’s work in our collection.  He absolutely loves what he does and is innovative, constantly reinventing his sculptural work.  We’re always excited to see his latest creations.”

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“Under Pressure” featuring selected works by Bret Price runs from July 21 to September 18 with the opening reception on Thursday, July 21 at 6 pm at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 West Malvern Ave., Fullerton, 714-738-6595 or [email protected].  For more information about Price and his work, visit www.BretPrice.com.